Veterinary Pest Genomics Center Overview

The Veterinary Pest Genomics Center (VPGC) is an initiative within the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The vision for this initiative is to leverage big data solutions to evaluate risk from, and develop mitigations for invasive and other economically important veterinary pests. The introduction of invasive veterinary pests is accelerated by global change, including anomalies related to climate variability. An important aspect of this effort is to foster an innovation ecosystem involving the network of laboratories directly linked to ARS National Program 104 (Veterinary, Medical, and Urban Entomology), and related locations, in a way that allows ARS to leverage its scientific talent and other research assets.

VPGC's mission is to:

Utilize key biological resources, next generation sequencing technology, and state-of-the-art bioinformatics approaches to sequence and annotate the genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes and metagenomes of important and emerging arthropod pests of veterinary importance

Develop and use molecular tools for population genomics studies of veterinary pests in their indigenous and invasive ranges to understand the role of different evolutionary forces in shaping phenotypic variation of high-consequence to agriculture

Apply biogeographic, spatial, and temporal analyses to quantify and predict economically important or potential veterinary pest distributional changes, and integrate these analyses with genetic studies of rapid evolution and adaptation of pests to new or changing environments

Conduct feasibility studies to evaluate advanced computing hardware and software systems for their ability to store and analyze large data sets on veterinary pests, and the capacity to integrate results from longitudinal
environmental assessments

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More about the program

Highlighted Projects:

Dr. Kristina Friesen of the Agroecosystem Management Research Unit is characterizing the effects of heat stress on the physiology and behavior of stable flies by analyzing differential transcript expression.

Dr. Dana Nayduch of the Arthropod-borne Animal Diseases Research Unit is studying differential utilization of dung as a developmental substrate for dipteran larvae through transcriptome and microbiome analyses.

Unigene sequences were annotated by BlastX alignment to the non-redundant protein database (National Center for Biotechnology Information/GenBank) and the Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus gene annotations (Vectorbase). This was done with a 1e-05 expectation value. Top hits are shown including accession numbers and description, if available. Unigene number and corresponding GenBank accession numbers are provided for all C. sonorensis genes.